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Friday, February 27, 2015

Standard & Poor's Rating Services recently issued a negative outlook for nonprofit higher education for
2015. "Upping the Ante: Costs of Luring Top Students Keeps the Outlook
Negative on U.S. Not-for-Profit Higher Education Sector" cites that
colleges and universities will continue to struggle to balance their
rising costs with student affordability. In addition, increased
competition within the industry will require even stronger in-house
management.
Education funding is taking a hit nationwide as more and more states are instituting cuts. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey's proposed budget
calls for $75 million in cuts to the state's public universities.
Already heavily dependent on tuition dollars for the majority of their
operating budget, educational leaders there worry how these potential
cuts will further affect their bottom line - in particular at Arizona
State University where officials previously announced no tuition
increases for existing in-state ASU students.

Around this time a few years ago, I was patiently waiting
for any news. Ok, by “patiently waiting,” I really mean “obsessively
checking the status of my application online.” For the most recent wave
of F31 NRSA submissions—as I’m sure the applicants are well aware—review committees are beginning to meet to discuss and score those applications.

If this was your first submission, brace yourself—you
likely won’t be receiving an award notice in your inbox (those aren’t
doled out until later anyway). A few fortunate applicants will be
awarded on the first round, but the majority won’t make the cut. So next
comes the big decision to revise and resubmit your application, or let
it go. After getting a “Not Discussed” (see below) on my first
submission, I received funding for my application on my resubmission.
I’ve shared a few things below that I learned during my process of
revising and resubmitting my F31 application.

Sixteen months after rejecting the idea by a narrow margin, adjunct
instructors at Bentley University have overwhelmingly voted to form a
union affiliated with the Service Employees International Union.
The vote at the private college in Waltham, Mass., was 108 to 42. The
union chapter is the latest of several formed in an SEIU campaign to
organize adjunct faculty members at private colleges throughout the Boston area.
Bentley’s administration, which had opposed the unionization of
adjuncts there, issued a statement in which it accepted the election
results, tallied on Thursday, and pledged to bargain with the union in
good faith.

The faculty union at the University of Delaware has assailed the
president over a column he wrote suggesting that professors give up some
of their autonomy in course design, among other things, The News Journalreports.
The union called the ideas presented in Patrick T. Harker’s February 5 column in The Philadelphia Inquirer “an affront to the mission of university education and to core values of academic life.”

Thursday, February 26, 2015

It started as a simple question on social media: What would happen if adjuncts across the country walked out on the same day, at the same time?
That question got answered Wednesday -- sort of -- on the first-ever
National Adjunct Walkout Day. There were some big walkouts at a few
institutions but, for a variety of reasons, adjuncts at many more
colleges and universities staged alternative protests, such as
teach-ins, rallies and talks. Still, the movement led to unprecedented
levels of conversation on many campuses, in the media and elsewhere
about the working conditions of the majority of college faculty (those
off the tenure track). And as a result, adjunct activists declared the
day a success -- while wondering what comes next.

The National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday ordered a regional official
to reconsider a case focused on whether faculty members at a private college in
Pittsburgh have too
much say in managing their institution to be allowed to unionize.
The case, involving Point Park University, is the sixth that the federal
agency has ordered regional officials to reconsider in light of its December
ruling in a case involving Pacific Lutheran University. In contrast to the
other five cases, however, the Point Park dispute does not involve a religious
college arguing that its First Amendment religious freedom would be infringed
by NLRB oversight stemming from unionization. Instead, it involves a secular
private college and an issue that arose in only some of the religious-college
cases: whether the faculty members who seek to unionize should be considered
managers and therefore precluded from doing so.

The
National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday ordered a regional official
to reconsider a case focused on whether faculty members at a private
college in Pittsburgh have too much say in managing their institution to be allowed to unionize.
The case, involving Point Park University, is the sixth that the
federal agency has ordered regional officials to reconsider in light of
its December ruling
in a case involving Pacific Lutheran University. In contrast to the
other five cases, however, the Point Park dispute does not involve a
religious college arguing that its First Amendment religious freedom
would be infringed by NLRB oversight stemming from unionization.
Instead, it involves a secular private college and an issue that arose
in only some of the religious-college cases: whether the faculty members
who seek to unionize should be considered managers and therefore
precluded from doing so.
- See more at:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/nlrb-orders-review-of-faculty-unionization-case-at-point-park-u/94663#sthash.ddTyXqEE.dpuf

Efforts to unionize faculty members at the California Institute of
the Arts have stalled just as professors were about to vote on whether
to join the Service Employees International Union, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The SEIU is trying to organize part-time professors
in cities across the country. The effort at the California Institute of
the Arts was distinct in that nearly all faculty members would have
been represented, because the college does not offer tenure. One
professor told the Times that the petition to hold an election had been withdrawn because of a lack of support for unionization among faculty members.

When the idea for National Adjunct
Walkout Day was first floated last fall on social media, the plan was simple:
Designate a single day of action, and stage events nationwide that would call
attention to adjuncts’ often-low pay, lack of job security, and challenging
working conditions. In contingent circles, the idea spread like wildfire.

But there was an obvious challenge:
Not everyone had the option of walking out. Many adjuncts on unionized campuses
were prohibited from doing so by their collective bargaining agreements; other
part-time professors felt that they simply couldn’t afford to leave their
classrooms.

So instead, the event aimed to give
adjuncts the freedom and flexibility to tailor events to their particular
campuses and circumstances. The result? It’s hard to estimate just
how many people actually took part in the national walkout, held Wednesday. But
in addition to the part-time faculty members who left their classrooms, others
led campus protests, organized teach-in events, and followed along on the
Twitter hashtag #NAWD, among other actions.

When
the idea for National Adjunct Walkout Day was first floated last fall
on social media, the plan was simple: Designate a single day of action,
and stage events nationwide that would call attention to adjuncts’
often-low pay, lack of job security, and challenging working conditions.
In contingent circles, the idea spread like wildfire.
But there was an obvious challenge: Not everyone had the option of
walking out. Many adjuncts on unionized campuses were prohibited from
doing so by their collective bargaining agreements; other part-time
professors felt that they simply couldn’t afford to leave their
classrooms.
So instead, the event aimed to give adjuncts the freedom and
flexibility to tailor events to their particular campuses and
circumstances. The result? It’s hard to estimate
just how many people actually took part in the national walkout, held
Wednesday. But in addition to the part-time faculty members who left
their classrooms, others led campus protests, organized teach-in events,
and followed along on the Twitter hashtag #NAWD, among other actions.
- See more at:
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/919-walking-out-teaching-in-and-puppeteering-a-glimpse-at-national-adjunct-walkout-day#sthash.GM0kNlu8.dpuf

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

The image you’ll likely see is that
of a man with matted hair, vacant eyes, and leathery skin. He’s probably
wearing torn clothes, with an odor that hits you from a good distance away.

Now open your eyes and look at the
photo above of Mary-Faith Cerasoli.

She’s a professionally dressed
middle-aged woman with a careworn face, hair swept back prettily over her ears,
plucked eyebrows, rouged lips, and manicured nails. She’s an adjunct professor
who teaches Spanish and Italian at the Bronx and Manhattan campuses of Mercy
College and Nassau Community College in Long Island. She has a life-threatening
thyroid disease, and she’s homeless.

Since fall of 2010, when the
52-year-old started adjuncting, Cerasoli has had to rely on the kindness of
friends to survive because her pay is so meager. Over the past six months she’s
had to move four times. Her annual salary for teaching five courses per semester
is around $22,000 before taxes. Because she has no health insurance, she goes
to a specialty clinic in Manhattan, where she has racked up thousands of
dollars in medical bills.

I have been a temp for 20 years.
I began teaching as an
adjunct in 1995 at Brooklyn College (part of the City University of New
York). I had enrolled in an MFA program there, and hiring adjuncts was
CUNY’s form of financial aid to graduate students.
Adjunct
instructors, in case you are unaware, are part-time instructors in
colleges and universities. (Trust academia to give a fancy name to a
temp.) Adjuncts are paid by the course and hired by the semester.
But
they’re an entrenched part of the system. The trend of hiring adjuncts
has grown. They now comprise over half of instructors in higher
education.

I’m originally from Quebec, where there is a long history of strikes and walkouts, up to today. Most recently, there was the Printemps Érables (many of the links in my original post are now dead and gone. Here is some general information in English as well as an in-depth overview
– and as an aside, the Quebec history entries on Wikipedia in English
are terrible). The striking students brought down the government, but
change didn’t really happen (they’re planning to strike again this spring). But they have long recognized the power of collective action in order to bring about change, however incremental.
All of this to say that I was pretty excited to see that this year
will see a National Adjunct Walkout Day. We have been long working to
bring more visibility to adjunct issues on campus, on the ground. There
was a Campus Equity Week
where adjuncts and adjunct supporters were asked to wear red. But this
is the first time that there has been an attempt to organize a
full-scale national, nay, with campuses from Canada participating,
international day of protest around adjunct issues.

New Jersey college students may arrive at class today and find their
professors packing up their bags and skipping class in the first-ever
"National Adjunct Walkout Day."
The loosely-organized national protest is designed to highlight the
plight of part-time professors and lecturers on college campuses.
Organizers have been using social media sites, including Facebook and Tumblr, to urge adjunct professors to participate in the walkout.
Adjuncts are typically hired to teach one or more courses per
semester. Compared to full-time professors, they earn low pay and have
little job security. But they now make up the majority of teachers on
college campuses nationwide, according to a survey released last year by
the American Association of University Professors.

Educational innovations like the flipped classroom, clickers, and
online discussions can present difficulties for students with
disabilities.
The issue was highlighted this month, when Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were sued for allegedly failing to provide such students with closed captioning for online lectures and course materials.
Peter Blanck, chairman of the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University and author of eQuality: The Struggle for Web Accessibility by Persons With Cognitive Disabilities (Cambridge University Press, 2014),said blind and deaf students need to be considered when shifting core parts of teaching to the Internet.

Adjunct instructors at colleges around the nation plan on Wednesday to
stage events designed to call attention to their low pay and poor
working conditions. On Tuesday, The Chronicle interviewed Ellen
Schrecker, a professor of history at Yeshiva University who has
extensively researched academic labor and the broader labor movement, to
get her assessment of adjuncts’ hopes of bringing about change. An
edited transcript of the conversation follows.

As part of National Adjunct Walkout Day
today, many adjuncts -- along with some students and tenure-line
faculty members -- will walk out of their classes or participate in
other forms of protest on campuses across the U.S. and Canada. The idea
was posed in the fall on social media to highlight adjuncts' working
conditions, lack of job security and relatively low pay. Many adjuncts
on unionized campuses are prohibited by their collective bargaining
agreements or state laws from walking out, but many unions have pledged
to support the effort through awareness campaigns, such as teach-ins. A
list of actions is available here, and updates will be posted throughout the day on Twitter under #NAWD and on Facebook.

It's not every day that respected academics reveal their personal
struggles, especially to a big audience of colleagues and strangers. So a
recent talk by Peter Railton, the Gregory S. Kavka Distinguished
University Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of philosophy at
the University of Michigan, is making the rounds on social media --
along with accounts of multiple standing ovations and even open weeping
from some of those present. Railton’s topic? His battle with depression,
which he says he's hidden for too long.
“As academics, we live in its midst,” Railton said, according to a
draft of the John Dewey Lecture he delivered last week at the annual
meeting of the American Philosophical Association’s Central Division in
St. Louis. “We know how it hurts our students, our colleagues, our
teachers, our families. Of course, most of us are ‘educated’ about
depression -- we like to think that we no longer consider it a stain on
one’s character. We've gotten beyond that. Or have we?”

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Recently I was invited to speak at
the Albert Shanker Institute, the think tank run by the American Federation of
Teachers. I know, it kind of makes your head explode, right?

Heavyweights from across the country
gathered there in January to discuss the future
of our movement. After I got past the suits and lingering hot air, I was struck
by just how far the discussion—even in official circles—has swung towards
labor’s troublemaking wing.

AFL-CIO Vice-President Tefere Gebre,
for example, made a point of saying we can’t do anything without rank-and-file
members at the center. Speaker after speaker said our power comes from our ability
to disrupt. And to my pleasant surprise, more than one raised the thorny topic
of union democracy.

Trustees of financially troubled South Carolina State University
unanimously voted Monday to place President Thomas Elzey on
administrative leave. The closed-door vote took place 11 days after
trustees said they were standing behind their president. But since then,
lawmakers have rapidly lost their patience with the state’s only public
historically black university and its $11 million of debt. Mr. Elzey
has nearly three years left on his contract, and it was not immediately
clear whether he would be paid. The Feb. 12 statement of confidence in
Mr. Elzey came after a State House committee suggested temporarily
closing the school to get its finances in order and the Legislative
Black Caucus called for the removal of the president. Since then, the
State House Ways and Means Committee advanced a proposal to replace all
trustees and fire the president.